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Tribute without copyright

Internet activist and programmer Aaron Swartz, who played a key role in stopping a controversial online piracy bill in Congress, has died at age 26, an apparent suicide, New York authorities said January 13, 2013. REUTERS/Noah Berger

Academics in the United States and worldwide are paying tribute to internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide on Friday. Scholars tweeted out links to their published work, using #pdftribute.

Swartz, a long-time advocate of internet freedom, worked to increase open access on the web and helped lead the charge against the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). He was facing the prospect of a million dollar fine and a long jail sentence for allegedly stealing millions of academic articles at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tribute without copyright

A fitting tribute to Aaron might be a mass protest uploading of copyright-protected research articles. Dump them on Gdocs, tweet the link. Think of the great blu-ray encoding protest but on a bigger scale for research articles. philoscience

Hashtag #pdftribute is remembering Aaron Swartz in a way he'd have loved - by tweeting links to academic papers free of chargeGrace Gold

Many professors and researchers posted links to their own academic work on Twitter. A full list can be found at pdftribute.net.